


Diagnostic Criteria.

by amorremanet



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 30 Days of SPN Women, Child Abuse, Community: 100_women, Demonic Possession, Dysfunctional Family, Episode: s03e16 No Rest for the Wicked, Family, Gen, Lilith's child vessel, Mental Health Issues, Name all the unnamed characters, Psychic Abilities, Psychic Bond, Reclaim all the narratives, Ruby 1.0's vessel, Team Free Will 2.0, Triggers, Vessel Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-03
Updated: 2012-02-03
Packaged: 2017-11-03 22:11:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/386527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amorremanet/pseuds/amorremanet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Emily's ten when she meets her first shrink…</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diagnostic Criteria.

Emily's ten when she meets her first shrink — his name's Doctor Waters and he wears coke-bottle glasses over squinty, brown little eyes and a tweed jacket that looks like it's molding; he keeps notes on a yellow legal and even though they're upside down and smudged in places, Emily can read most of the scribbles that he took while talking to her parents. _Older sister dead a year… Suffered three deaths in quick succession (sister, Zooey; live-in Grandfather, Pat; nanny, Mrs. Rose Wolfson)… Saw family dog run over by a truck right in front of her…_

Great — Mom and Dad have been lying to people again. Emily sighs, rolls her eyes, curls her legs up to her chin. They ache. Ache like she's got pins and needles stabbing into her. She's always been small for her age, but this growth spurt thing's making her shoot up and everything _hurts_ because of it. It gets worse as she keeps reading: _Sister ran away from home, May '07, two weeks before eighteenth birthday —_ Yeah, that's a laugh. Zooey didn't run away; she was taken. Emily knows what she saw.

 _Sisters v close. Z. abandoned E. at playground —_ again, that's funny. As though Zooey would've done that. As though she would've abandoned Emily anywhere, much less at the park, when they were the only ones there, and Grandpa was playing bridge with Mister Weprin, and Mom and Dad weren't home from work yet. Emily **knows what she saw** — she remembers it like it happened yesterday, even though it's been two years. She remembers it like she remembers feeling Lilith flick her wrist and kill Grandpa, even though that was a year ago. She **_knows_** what she saw, what she smelled, what she felt and heard…

She saw black smoke go down Zooey's throat. She saw Zooey's eyes turn black. She smelled something thick, and sticky, and gross, like rotten eggs, and when Zooey laughed, the sound Emily heard wasn't her big sister's voice. About a year after that, she saw black smoke again, on the same playground — only, this time, it came for her. It went into _her_ throat. It sent a shock up her spine, like static electricity but a hundred times worse. It lurched in her stomach and took over _her_ body…

She heard the demon's voice in her head, whispering that her name was Lilith and she was Emily's friend now, that she'd make sure Mrs. Wolfson never yelled at her and Freckles ever again, that Grandpa wouldn't stay at Mister Weprin's all night or act funny and smell like church wine when he came home, that Mom and Dad would come back from work before her bedtime… Lilith promised to make sure they _stayed_ home. Even now, Emily remembers the sick, caramel popcorn crackle and the warm lilt over her voice. Emily had to watch everything that Lilith used her body to do…

Nobody can take that away from her. Not her parents, or her teachers, or the kids at school who think she's creepy and weird because she reads the horror stories in the library books, studies them over lunch, takes notes on them, and says that they're not scary (because they aren't; they're little kid stuff; and anyway they're not what keeps her up at night until her body makes her sleep). And Doctor Waters and his coke-bottle glasses definitely can't take this away. He can have her here for an hour or however long. He can even see her next week. But he can't have her certainty.

Emily glances up at the clock and keeps reading his notes. He doesn't even try to stop her doing so — he must've caught on by now. At least she doesn't have to try and hide it now.

 _May '08: Family home broken into by sister, two men… Intruders threatened E. & parents with murder unless they stayed in the basement. Vague hostage situation… One intruder came after E. with knife, chased her out of bedroom… Heard "monster dogs" barking all over the house… Peeked upstairs, saw knife-intruder dragging out bloody corpse of other intruder… Sister dead in front room. No cause of death determined; possible drugs — _Emily wasn't supposed to hear Mom telling Dad what the county's Medical Examiner ruled after Zooey's autopsy. She's probably not supposed to be reading this note, either. But Zooey's body had been through Hell. Worn out and probably all ripped up inside. And the ME said the only thing she knew that could explain that kind of wear and tear was drugs, but there weren't any other signs of Zooey abusing them.

 _Police investigate break-in, find no leads, goes nowhere —_ Not like they could, when Mom and Dad kept _lying_ to them. Making up a story and changing it every single time they got caught in a misstep, making it just believable enough to get the homeowners' insurance pay-out and keep the police on their chain.

 _Symptoms mixed, going on since sister's disappearance. Reports nightmares, night terrors; never describes them. Only dream reported involved ghosts, demons, Hell; saw herself in Hell with a man, said he looked like dead intruder. Says she feels something dark, evil, inside of her. It knows her, she's powerless against it if it gets control. Hallucinations. Anxiety, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, believes people to be demons, angels, monsters, etc., imaginational or delusional? Investigate, discuss…_ Not very likely. Emily's not discussing anything with this jerk unless she can't help it.

 _Referred by school therapist. Chestnut Elementary, New Harmony, fifth grade. Starts sixth in the fall. Incident complicated. Started screaming in the middle of class for no reason, sobbing. Didn't calm down for an hour, refused to be taken to school nurse — claims to have seen black eyes, "demonic face." Claims to see these in others as well… Parents concerned —_ Emily actually laughs at that one — if they're so concerned, why did Mom and Dad hire Sarah to be Emily's new babysitter? Why don't they ever come home earlier? Why do they just keep repeating the same patterns, over and over again, the same things that brought Zooey's demon and Lilith into their lives in the first place?

Besides, what else was Emily supposed to do, in that situation? She'd felt sick all day. Ever since she'd woken up and seen the news reports about hurricanes and earthquakes and Swine Flu and nuclear tests in North Korea. It'd only gotten worse at school. Every class, she felt like she was going to throw up, and when she didn't, it just made her heart beat harder and her head spin. Sick and empty and nauseated and _wrong_ — like she'd forgotten something at home, knew it was missing, but couldn't, for the life of her, remember what it was.

Then, it came to her — flashes of images going through her mind, right in the middle of … Things she'd never seen before, memories that couldn't be hers… She saw a baby, a newborn, and saw herself snapping its neck, draining its blood into a cup. She saw an old church, made out of white bricks. She saw a statue of the Virgin Mary, with red trails of tears coming from her eyes. She saw Sam Winchester — the hunter who'd stood over her with a knife — and she watched him drink some nurse's blood until she died. She saw a short woman in a black leather jacket standing next to him, following him into the church and egging him on, and somehow, without knowing how, Emily just _knew_ the demon in that girl's body was the one who took Zooey away from her.

She saw a pale woman in a long, white dress, blond hair waving down to her chest as she prepared an altar — again without knowing how, Emily knew she was looking at Lilith. She watched Lilith challenge Sam Winchester, saw him kill her with just his mind. Emily saw Lilith fall to a heap on the floor, saw her blood start to form a circle — and that's when the visions stopped. Something white hot shocked through Emily's entire body and feeling it recede wasn't any better; then, every part of her was a scar, except the void in her stomach and her barren, crackling lungs.

Emily huffs, curls her legs up tighter and stares at the floor. Remembering all that leaves her feeling cold, like she's turned to ice and she'll never feel warm again. Three weeks on, those images still haunt her. She doesn't want them, but they won't _leave_.

Doctor Waters tilts his head as he watches her from his red leather armchair, squints his beady eyes like he expects her to do a trick, and asks if she'd like to tell him what the joke is. When Emily doesn't just start talking at him, even just to tell him that there isn't a joke, he says _ooookay_ , drawing out all the vowels with a sympathetic huff. Puts his elbow on one of the armrests and his chin on his hand. Twiddles his expensive pen in the other hand and tells her that he can't help her if she doesn't talk to him. That she's unwell and that all he wants — all anybody who sent or brought her here _wants_ — is to help her.

Emily looks out the window at her parents' shiny, black Mercedes-Benz and sighs. "You don't get it, Doctor," she says. "Nobody gets it. I'm _fine_ — it's the world that's screwed up and broken. I don't need help and even if I did, you can't help me. Just like nobody could help Zooey."

"No one could help your sister, Emily, because she didn't let anyone know that things were going so badly for her. Perhaps she got into trouble —"

"She _didn't_ —"

"And she was high, so the drugs were playing tricks on her mind, so she thought that she couldn't trust your parents —"

"Zooey never took drugs! Maybe the demon that got inside of her did things with her body, but Zooey never did drugs on her own — she wouldn't do that to herself, she had a friend who did it and she died, and Zooey always told me not to _because she wouldn't do that_. There's no way you can help me if you don't know that. If I needed help."

"Emily, _really_ ," he drawls, in a heavy voice. He takes off his glasses and folds them up. "How can you _not_ see that you need help? Talking about demons, and monsters, and all of that nonsense… What about the nightmare you had when the angels ripped Dean Winchester from the Pit? Anybody else would know they were losing their mind… Haven't you even _stopped_ to think that you might just be reacting terribly to two years of incredible stress?"

"You're not listening to me — everybody says they are, but they're not, and they don't get it, but…" She trails off. Pauses. Her lips tremble and fall open, her tongue feels thick and dry — but she manages to find her voice enough to say, "you… you can't know that. …Nobody knows his name was Dean Winchester. And nobody knows I felt it when he came back to life — I didn't tell anybody about that, I know I didn't…"

And that's when the doctor grins, baring all his teeth, looking like a wolf and not a psychiatrist. That's when his eyes turn black.

In the back of her mind, Emily knows to keep quiet. Knows that screaming will mean more doctors, different doctors, maybe pills or worse than that. More looks from her parents that they think she doesn't notice — those wrinkled noses and furrowed brows and pursed lips; those _looks_ where they pale like they're sick and they think she's going to snap; those **_looks_** because they _know_ that she's not lying and they don't do anything to help, because it's more comfortable to pretend everything with Lilith never happened. Screaming means even more people telling her that she's crazy.

But Doctor Waters stands up and dusts off his sleeves. His eyes are still black. Emily jumps up. Tries to scramble up the back of the couch. Even after her parents and the doctor's secretary come running into the office, she screams that he's one of them, he's a demon, can't they see it. She screams herself raw.

And the demon inside him just twists Doctor Waters' lips up into a smirk, because his eyes are back to brown and beady, which means that he's as good as won.


End file.
